Six of the nine nominations announced this week for Best Picture are based on books, reflecting a recent pattern in which the Oscar lists have consistently and gratifyingly affirmed cinema's dependence on literature. Apart from a modest lurch towards originality in 2010, the previous five years saw line-ups in which half or more of the shortlistees were adaptations, including the winners No Country for Old Men (2008), Slumdog Millionaire (2009) and The King's Speech (2011).

Diehard believers in cinema's creative autonomy will no doubt point in the Oscars list not only to The Artist, but also to two self-penned movies by publicity-averse veteran auteurs, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. They'd be unwise to do so, as these films are by no means pure of literary influences. Online commenters have begun to note echoes of DH Lawrence (as well as Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 2001) in Malick's Palme d'Or winner, and particularly The Rainbow's portrayal of one family against a cosmic backdrop; while Midnight in Paris makes no secret of its bookish hankerings, magically granting its present-day protagonist encounters with Djuna Barnes, TS Eliot, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.